In order to facilitate efficient and user-friendly exploration of available data sets, it is essential to visualize the data as quickly and easily as possible. Selecting appropriate visualization approaches for potentially highly-dynamic spatio-temporal data sets is still a challenge. At the recent EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online, members of the mVIZ consortium introduced a methodology to support the selection and creation of user-friendly visualizations for data discoverable via the open data portals such as the mCLOUD.

Design and Development of Interoperable Cloud Sensor Services to Support Citizen Science Projects

Citizen Observatories are becoming an increasingly popular source of input data in many scientific domains. During the recent EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online, Simon Jirka (52°North) presented the ideas behind the European H2020 project Cos4Cloud (Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud). The project aims at providing re-usable services for setting up Citizen Observatories based on the European Open Science (EOS) Cloud. In particular, it will use interoperability standards such as the the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS), SensorThings API and Observations and Measurements (O&M).

The 52°North Open Innovation Network has extended the deadline for abstract submissions. New deadline is June 14th.

This virtual event will take place from August 31 – September 2, 2020. Become a part of an exciting mix of tutorials/webinars, live discussions, presentations, lightning talks and more addressing aspects of geospatial sensing.

During the recent EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online, Arne de Wall (52°North) presented results of the CDI@IT.NRW pilot project. The project developed a Copernicus infrastructure node largely based on cloud technologies (i.a. Docker, Kubernetes) for the state North Rhine-Westphalia’s common Spatial Data Infrastructure.

This project was initiated to ease the access and analysis of data provided by the PROBA-V mission exploitation platform (MEP) at the Flemish Institute for Technology & Research (VITO). Project partners developed the toolbox according to the needs of the time series analysis community.

]]>Google Summer of Code 2020https://52north.org/news/google-summer-of-code-2020/
Thu, 07 May 2020 11:17:06 +0000https://52north.org/?p=7387We welcome three students for this year's Google Summer of Code]]>

52°North welcomes students participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code

52°North is pleased to announce that we will mentor three students for Google Summer of Code 2020! The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for Open Source projects. During their break from university, the students work on a 3 month programming project. This year, 199 mentoring organizations reviewed 8,902 applications—submitted by 6,626 students from 121 countries— and selected 1,199 students from 66 countries.

52°North welcomes three students, who will tackle different projects ranging from trajectory analysis for enviroCar, improved car selection for the enviroCar app, to creating a new Angular WPS Module based on TypeScript.

Trajectory Analytics Toolbox (John Murzaku)

Improvement of the Car Selection Process in the enviroCar Android App (Arvind Negi)

Angular WPS Client library (Karan Singh)

After a period of community bonding, in which the students get to know their mentors and the organization better, coding begins. Stay tuned for the student blogs!

This virtual event will take place from August 31 – September 2, 2020. The 52°North Open Innovation Network invites you to become a part of an exciting mix of tutorials/webinars, live discussions, presentations, lightning talks and more addressing aspects of geospatial sensing.

This year, the EGU General Assembly shares part of its activities as EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online. 52°North will present a number of topics ranging from citizen science for traffic management and air quality, efficient processing and analysis of EO data, to visualization of spatio-temporal data. We will post our presentations upfront as a blog series “EGU2020”. If you are interested, please feel free to join the EGU2020 chat rooms according to the EGU2020 schedule from May 4 – 8 to discuss the topics in depth or contact us directly.

The 52°North Open Innovation Network invites researchers, software developers and practitioners to submit abstracts as presentation proposals. This year’s program includes an additional EDC Forum session, which particularly invites members of Esri’s EDC community to present and discuss their work in the field of Geospatial Sensing.

Despite the current uncertainty, we hope that the Corona Virus situation will have developed to a point that we will be able to hold our conference in Münster at the end of August. If this is not possible, we plan to hold it as a Web Conference.

The European Union promotes Cos4Cloud, an ambitious project that will create cutting-edge technology services to improve citizen science platforms. Among other services, it will include integrating observations from different citizen science platforms into a portal, artificial intelligence tools that help citizens recognize species when they send an observation, and standardized data from different platforms. These technological services will be available in the new European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), so that each new or existing project will be able to choose and install the ones it needs and improve its functionalities.

Cos4Cloud (Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud) aims to develop ten technological services so that citizen science platforms, known as citizen observatories, are viable in the long term and more global in scope. The project, co-funded by the European Horizon 2020 program, will make these services available to the entire community in the new European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a virtual space aimed at European scientific staff. “It will be like going to a supermarket to take the ingredients that interest us to improve or create our own citizen observatory”, says Jaume Piera, Institute of Marine Science of CSIC (ICM-CSIC) researcher and project coordinator. The services will be presented in the form of modules. In this way, each new or existing project will be able to choose and install the ones it needs and improve its functionalities.

A unique language to understand and exchange data between observatories. One of the first challenges will be to establish a “common vocabulary” among all citizen science data “Right now many of the citizen science projects work without international standards, this prevents data from being reused and easily integrated or shared between projects easily”, comments Joan Masó, researcher at CREAF and coordinator of the interoperability part in Cos4Cloud.

A portal where the observations of multiple citizen science platforms will be integrated. Another of the proposals is to create a portal in which the set of observations from several platforms are available. “For example, if a scientist wanted to carry out a study on the distribution of squirrels in her country, all squirrel observations could be downloaded from this portal without worrying about the citizen science observatory or the country they come from”, points out Karen Soacha, researcher at ICM-CSIC and Cos4Cloud.

Use artificial intelligence as an ally in the identification of species. Automatic image recognition that can be used thanks to machine learning will also be a protagonist in the design of services. This technology is already used in citizen science projects such as PlantNet, where you send the photo of a plant and it helps you to identify it. “In Cos4Cloud, in addition to making this technology available to other citizen science projects, we want to go one step further and suggest the species that you can find in a certain area”, explains Alexis Joly, researcher at INRIA and Cos4Cloud.

In addition, automatic video recognition services, advanced mobile application interfaces and other innovative technological advances will be developed in order to improve the quality of citizen observatory data.

The project places the improvement and sustainability of citizen science at the centre

The Open Science European Union Agenda considers citizen science as the eighth priority together with the creation of the EOSC. Therefore, this open virtual space will integrate most of the services and results of Open Science that are carried out in Europe in the coming years and also those coming from Cos4Cloud. The objective is that European scientific personnel can reuse these resources for their research, innovation and educational purposes. “By doing this we want to make sure that the economy of the citizen science platforms is not a limitation to its developing and maintenance with the best technology” reflects Miquel Ángel Rodríguez, grant manager of Cos4Cloud.

The key of Cos4Cloud success will be multidisciplinary and international collaboration

Cos4Cloud relies on the participation of a network of citizen science projects focused on biodiversity and the environment. These platforms will be responsible for testing the different services with their users. Four of the largest citizen biodiversity observatories in Europe will collaborate in the first part of the project: Natusfera, iSpot, PlantNet and Artportalen. In the second part, the services will be tested on platforms focused on environmental monitoring in water (Freshwater Watch and KdUINO), of odours in the city (OdourCollect), in the air (CanAir.io) and by aerosols (iSpex).

Citizen Science in action

“In the long run, our idea is that citizen science projects in other areas such as health can benefit from these services. We also want to facilitate citizen initiatives to collaborate and dialogue with each other”, concludes Jaume.

During the project, co-design activities will also be carried out to discuss and improve the proposed services according to the citizen science needs. Among others, experts in citizen science, developers, industries and scientists will participate in the co-design activities.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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